At the Palomarin Field Station we have been monitoring birds and their environment since 1966. Since the beginning of our study, the area adjacent to the mist nets and banding station has undergone drastic habitat change, resulting in shifts in the local bird community. Tracking the changes in the habitat alongside the changes in bird populations at Palomarin can inform bird conservation as we learn more about what environmental factors are most important for certain species to thrive. Here, you can explore the habitat changes and bird community changes we have recorded through our long-term data collection.
During the 15 years before the field station was established, the land around Palomarin was partially cultivated for agricultural use and hosted many buildings. Since its inclusion in the nascent Point Reyes National Seashore in 1965, the land has not been disturbed significantly and habitat succession has gradually taken place.
In the earlier years of our study, the landscape at the field station was comprised of two distinct habitat types: the mist-netting and banding site was largely forested while the area adjacent, where much of our nest searching takes place, was dominated by short, open coastal scrub.
The vegetation across the study area has since grown in size and structure and has become a complex mix of mature scrub with tall coyote brush, poison oak, California blackberry, and a young, dense Douglas fir forest. We have documented the change in the average height of these firs over time, as well as an increase in the number of trees in the study area, and the height of shrub species like coyote brush.
Biologists at Palomarin survey the breeding bird community through mist netting and bird banding, as well as searching for nests and mapping the boundaries of breeding bird territories.
Nearly every day during the spring and summer, biologists collect data on the movements and behaviors of breeding birds to create territory maps representing that season’s breeding bird activity. The number of territories provides us with a measure of how many breeding individuals of each species are present in the bird community.
As the vegetation has changed, the breeding bird community has also changed a lot since the early 1980s, especially the addition of more species associated with mature forest.